Overreach, page 10
In President Yanukovych’s bedroom suite lay a dozen hand-made shoe trees, without shoes, all with identical wooden patches corresponding to the president’s bunions. In the library was an extensive collections of world literary classics, from Machiavelli to Schopenhauer, apparently never opened, though a selection of paperbacks on Russian sport were well thumbed. I considered personally liberating an English translation of Yanukovych’s book The Road to Success, but doubted that his advice would prove very useful. In the Gothic-panelled private film theatre were his and hers matching brown leather massage chairs and a large collection of DVDs and Blu-Ray discs, including Run Fatboy Run.
In the grounds was a private zoo containing ostriches and exotic birds, a golf course, a large collection of vintage motorcycles, cars and boats, and a dog-breeding centre with a veterinary surgical theatre and canine exercise machines. Most significantly, floating in the water by a lakeside dining room built in the shape of a pirate ship were thousands of documents. Later recovered by protesters and volunteer divers, the cache included receipts for cash bribes, files on opposition journalists and records of the president’s private meetings, including with Vladimir Putin in Moscow.
Yulia Kapica, a financial analyst from Berdyansk, spent the first days after the Maidan fishing documents from the lake and drying them out on the palace’s marble floors with hairdryers, then scanning them and sending the material to the Ministry of Finance and the police. ‘For me the Maidan wasn’t about the EU agreement but about getting our people to discover their Ukrainian identity,’ said Kapica, a 30-something blonde who had become one of the self-appointed ‘people’s guardians’ of the palace, which would later open officially as a Museum of Corruption. She wore her hair in a traditional Ukrainian braid held up with a hairband of blue and yellow plastic flowers. ‘Before the Maidan people were ashamed to be Ukrainians. After they were proud. They had stood up for themselves.’
Petya, a 34-year-old grocery salesman from Lviv, scuttled down the long, echoing corridors of the palace with a prim, clockwork gait organising rosters of volunteers to look after the abandoned property. He wore a traditional embroidered Ukrainian peasant shirt and the red-and-black flag of Stepan Bandera’s UPA draped over his shoulders. ‘This is what a revolution looks like,’ he said, peering out of the window at crowds of Kyivans who had come to gawk at the ancien regime’s excesses.2
By the morning of 22 February Yanukovych had reached Kharkiv. There he learned that his beloved Mezhyhirya had been seized by a crowd. He recorded a televised address in which he described the Maidan revolution as ‘gangsterism, vandalism, and a coup d’état’.3 Then he drove to the Kharkiv Palace of Sport for the planned congress. As he got out of his jeep and walked towards the doors he received a call on his mobile. Pro-Maidan soccer fans had broken through the cordon around the building and were about to storm the congress. Yanukovych turned around, got back into his car and drove four hours south to Donetsk Airport where his Falcon jet awaited. But Donetsk air-traffic controllers refused to clear his plane’s flight plan to Rostov, in south Russia. He once again got in his car and headed to the coast of Crimea, where he was picked up by a Russian helicopter.4
While crowds wandered through the fallen president’s bedroom at Mezhyhirya, an atmosphere of high tension prevailed at Putin’s suburban residence of Novo-Ogarevo. The decisions taken by Putin over the 24 hours after Yanukovych’s flight from Kyiv would lay the foundations not just for the annexation of Crimea but also for the invasion of 2022.
Putin ‘invited the leaders of our special services and the defence ministry to the Kremlin’ on the evening of 23 February, he told Andrei Kondrashov, a journalist with state-run channel Rossiya-1. In attendance were the closest members of Putin’s inner circle – Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, Security Council secretary Nikolai Patrushev, FSB head Aleksandr Bortnikov and his chief of staff Sergei Ivanov, according to a Kremlin press pool source.5 The first item on the agenda was to ‘set them the task of saving the life of the president of Ukraine, who would simply have been liquidated’, Putin told Rossiya-1. The second item was a military takeover of Crimea – supposedly to protect the local population from ‘anti-Russian’ violence by pro-Maidan elements.
Nikolai Patrushev and Sergei Ivanov, backed by FSB head Aleksandr Bortnikov, told Putin that private polls conducted by the Federal Protective Service showed that the Crimean population overwhelmingly supported joining Russia. They also argued that the Ukrainian state was effectively leaderless, with the remaining elements of government split between pro- and anti-Yanukovych forces. There was no commander-in-chief to authorise Ukraine’s military to defend Crimea. And in any case both the Ukrainian military and security services were themselves split between pro- and anti-Russian factions – thanks in part to major influence and bribery operations by Moscow’s own secret services. Shoigu, however, was more cautious, listing arguments against that included the possibility of NATO involvement and international economic sanctions.6 He also pointed out that there was no concrete military or political plan for the takeover or its political aftermath, meaning that major strategic decisions would have to be made on the fly.
After hours of discussion, the hawks – led by Patrushev and Putin himself – prevailed. ‘We finished about seven in the morning,’ Putin told Channel One in 2015. ‘When we were parting, I told all my colleagues, “We are forced to begin the work of returning Crimea to Russia.”’ Putin was misremembering. In fact, it would be weeks before the Kremlin finally decided that Crimea would become a part of Russia rather than a notionally independent puppet state like South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Despite his earlier objections it was Shoigu, as defence minister, who was handed responsibility for the operation to take over Crimea. He was told to proceed with ‘extreme caution’.7 Hours later, Shoigu despatched his old friend and long-serving deputy Vice-Admiral Oleg Belaventsev as his political envoy to Sevastopol. The operation to take Crimea was under way.
Empire, Defence or Opportunism?
Boris Yeltsin first threatened to take back Crimea from Ukraine in the aftermath of the Rada’s declaration of independence from the USSR as early as August 1991. Ultra-nationalist firebrand Vladimir Zhirinovsky had periodically raised the issue in the nineties, as did politically ambitious Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov as he manoeuvred, unsuccessfully, to succeed Yeltsin in 1999. But retaking Crimea had never formed part of Putin’s rhetoric. A deal to build a bridge across the Kerch Strait to connect southern Russia and Crimea had originally been signed by Yanukovych and Medvedev in 2010. But in the intervening four years Moscow had shown so little interest in the bridge project – or indeed in Crimea in general – that no feasibility study was undertaken. Nor had independence from Ukraine ever been a particularly popular or important issue in Crimea itself. Yanukovych’s pro-Moscow Party of the Regions had enjoyed strong support, but overtly pro-independence parties polled less than 5 per cent of the vote.
Between his successful annexation of Crimea in 2014 and his full-scale invasion of Ukraine eight years later, Putin would indeed develop something of an obsession both with mystical nationalism and historical justifications for Russia’s imperial greatness. But Moscow’s policies and behaviour towards Crimea before the final crisis of 22–27 February 2014 strongly suggest that the Kremlin’s priority was to retain Russian influence over the whole of Ukraine rather than carve off pieces of the country. It was only in midwinter 2013–14, as Yanukovych was visibly losing his grip on power, that the idea of actually taking over Crimea began to circulate in the Kremlin.
Vladimir Konstantinov, chairman of Crimea’s regional parliament, laid the groundwork. As the Maidan crisis gathered strength in Kyiv, Konstantinov made several trips to Moscow. In December 2013 he attended a meeting of Russia’s Security Council, chaired by Putin’s closest ally Nikolai Patrushev, former head of the FSB and the Kremlin’s top security official. Konstantinov told Patrushev that Crimea would be ready to ‘go to Russia’ if Yanukovych were overthrown. According to journalist Mikhail Zygar, Patrushev was ‘pleasantly surprised’ by the news. In late January a policy paper written by Orthodox billionaire Konstantin Malofeev – of whom we will hear more later – outlining the practicalities of a takeover of Crimea began to circulate among the Kremlin’s top advisers. The document, obtained in February 2015 by Novaya Gazeta, provided the Russian government with a strategy in the event of Yanukovych’s removal and the break-up of Ukraine – and also outlined plans for annexing Crimea and the eastern portions of the country that were closely matched by actual events. Malofeev and his co-authors also outlined plans for a public relations campaign to justify Russian actions.8
Putin would later explain the Crimean operation as a pre-emptive strike against the possibility that Ukraine’s new government might join NATO, resulting in Russia’s Black Sea Fleet losing its historic headquarters in Sevastopol. Putin had ‘heard declarations from Kyiv about Ukraine soon joining NATO’, he told Russian TV. But in fact such an outcome was, in 2014, highly unlikely. The UK, French and Germans’ clear refusal to advance Kyiv or Tbilisi’s applications for NATO membership in 2008 had been reinforced by Putin’s subsequent invasion of Georgia. And the election of Yanukovych had put Ukraine’s NATO ambitions not only on the back burner but made them actually illegal after a law barring Ukraine from participation in any military bloc was passed in 2010.
True, Ukraine under Yanukovych had indeed continued to participate in some NATO military exercises and contributed a ship to NATO anti-piracy operations. But if Putin was urgently concerned about NATO expansion, he failed to mention it to the Americans. Michael McFaul, who served as US President Barack Obama’s special assistant on Russia from 2009 to 2012 and as the US ambassador in Moscow from 2012 to early 2014, was present for all but one of the meetings between Obama and Putin or Dmitry Medvedev and also listened in on all the phone conversations Obama had with the Kremlin. McFaul could not ‘recall once that the issue of NATO expansion came up’ during any of those exchanges.9 The sudden overthrow of Yanukovych and the likelihood of a strongly pro-Western government succeeding him was indeed a strategic concern for the future. But there was no likelihood, much less a clear and present danger, of NATO’s accepting Ukraine’s membership on the eve of Putin’s Crimea operation. Top Russian officials ‘weren’t afraid of Ukraine joining NATO’, a senior military source told UCLA Professor Daniel Treisman at a meeting of the Kremlin-sponsored Valdai discussion club in 2015. ‘But they were definitely worried that the Ukrainians would cancel [Russia’s] lease on Sevastopol and kick out the Black Sea Fleet.’10
But the events of February and March 2014 suggest a third – and most convincing – explanation for Putin’s decision. His takeover of Crimea was opportunistic, unplanned and based on a snap assessment of fast-moving events. As Putin told Treisman in October 2015, the operation to seize the peninsula was ‘spontaneous’ and was ‘not at all’ planned in advance.11 The decision came first, the justification later.
The Chinese ideogram for ‘crisis’ is, as Winston Churchill most famously remarked, a combination of the characters meaning ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity’. For the men assembled in the Kremlin that February night, the danger was the supposed threat to the future of Sevastopol. The opportunity was the chaos in Kyiv that meant that Russia had to strike immediately or not at all.
Betrayal
As well as calculated opportunism, powerful emotion was at work too in the form of anger at the West’s supposed treachery. Yanukovych had, under pressure from the Kremlin, done everything the NATO foreign ministers had asked of him – and nonetheless been deposed. ‘He signed an agreement, ordered the withdrawal of the police, and remained in the country,’ an indignant Peskov told Zygar in 2015. ‘The European mediators promised to guarantee the implementation of the agreement. What happened was simply appalling and absolutely unprecedented.’12
For Putin – unable, after a lifetime in the KGB, to imagine that an angry crowd might act spontaneously rather than on the orders of some higher puppet-masters – the Maidan’s victory was a personal turning point. Putin had spent the first 14 years of his career playing on the West’s terms. He had dutifully shown up at G8 summits, even proudly hosted one in his native St Petersburg. He had regularly spoken to Western leaders, constantly arguing Russia’s demands for its security interests not to be ignored. And yet Russia – and Putin personally – had been repeatedly ignored and, to his mind, humiliated.
‘Putin always behaved like an uncouth provincial invited to dinner by his aristocratic relatives,’ said a source who has known Putin as a close family friend since childhood. ‘He was delighted to be at the table, but angry that he thought people were looking down on him.’13 Putin himself had confirmed his deep sense of personal grievance in a 2007 interview with Time magazine after the US publication had made him ‘Person of the Year’. ‘Sometimes one gets the impression that America does not need friends. Sometimes we get the impression that you need some kind of auxiliary subjects to take command of,’ said Putin. To Americans, Russians ‘are a little bit savage still or they just climbed down from the trees, you know, and probably need to have their hair brushed and their beards trimmed. And have the dirt washed out of their beards and hair.’14 In the wake of the West’s supposed perfidy over the Maidan, the time had finally come to show that Russians were not savages, but a country that was determined to command respect. When Echo Moskvy editor-in-chief Aleksei Venediktov suggested to Putin that the annexation of Crimea had violated international law, Putin’s response was telling. ‘Unfair, is it? But was it right?’ Putin told Venediktov. ‘Crimea is Russian by its nature. So it was the right thing to do.’15
Everything that would later precipitate Putin’s 2022 invasion – the fear of foreign encroachment, the anger at Western hypocrisy, the imperial ambition – fell into place in the hours and days that followed Yanukovych’s fall. For Putin, the real target of the Western powers who had supposedly orchestrated the Maidan’s victory was not Yanukovych but Putin himself. The Maidan ‘was a direct threat to Russia,’ Peskov told Zygar. The West’s ‘goal was to get rid of Putin. They do not like him. Russia is too obstinate under Putin and unwilling to make concessions. They are ready to do anything to get rid of him. We sensed this even before Ukraine, but afterward it was a different matter. After Ukraine the diplomatic masks came off. Before that, the confrontation was wrapped up in diplomatic plastic wrap, but now the plastic wrap was removed.’16 From 23 February 2014 on, Putin considered himself at war with the collective West.
Crimea Is Ours!
Vice-Admiral Oleg Belaventsev arrived at Simferopol airport in Crimea around midday on 23 February. A long-time aide to Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, Belaventsev was both a naval officer and – like Putin, Patrushev, Bortnikov and Ivanov – a former career KGB officer. He had served as a spy in the Soviet embassy in London and later managed various controversial businesses connected to Shoigu.17 For all his skills as an intelligence officer, military commander, Kremlin insider and bureaucrat-businessman, Belaventsev had little experience of Crimea’s political scene. After considering and rejecting two veteran Crimean politicians he eventually found the man he was looking for to lead Crimea out of Ukraine and into Russia.
Sergey Aksyonov, leader of the little-known Russian Unity party in Crimea, was not an old-school machine politician but a former boxer and pro-Russian businessman universally known by his underworld nickname ‘Goblin’. ‘The speaker of the Crimean parliament told me [that Aksyonov is] our Che Guevara,’ Putin told Russian TV the following year. ‘Just what we needed.’ Aksyonov would be the first of a long series of underworld bosses hired by the Kremlin to secure its new territories in Ukraine.
To help install Aksyonov in power, ‘advisers’ were despatched to Simferopol from the FSB and the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service. Among them was Igor Girkin, a former FSB officer and enthusiastic military re-enactor, who under his new nom-de-guerre Igor Strelkov (‘Igor the Shooter’) would soon go rogue and begin his own private war in Donbas. An emergency meeting of Crimea’s parliament was swiftly called for 26 February. Deputies who refused to attend were kidnapped from their homes by plainclothes FSB officers and frog-marched to the session by force. As rumours spread that Crimea’s Supreme Council was going to ask Putin to accept the province into the Russian Federation, scuffles broke out outside the parliament building. Russians – reinforced by plainclothes FSB men – had come out in support, Crimean Tatars in protest. Two people were killed in the ensuing fight – one crushed, the other dying of a heart attack.
Shoigu now had his excuse to move in, ostensibly to prevent further unrest. Overnight ten Russian military aircraft landed in Simferopol carrying paratroopers from the 76th Guards Division based in Pskov.18 By the following morning, servicemen in Russian uniforms without insignia had seized Crimea’s regional parliament and other key government buildings. They occupied the peninsula’s two airports and fanned out onto the streets of Simferopol and Sevastopol. Putin and Shoigu publicly and repeatedly denied that they were Moscow’s troops. ‘Anyone can buy Russian uniforms in a shop,’ Putin told Russian TV with his trademark smirk. The state-run Russian media, taking the cue, delightedly dubbed the mysterious troops ‘little green men’ and ‘polite people’.
